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A Sugar-Free French Open Run

Sloane Stephens swings during her third-round victory over Mathilde Johansson on Friday.

Sloane Stephens, the first American into the fourth round at the French Open, recently discovered the secret to success in tennis: Don’t drink soda.

“I was drinking Fantas like twice a day,” Stephens said. (For the record, she prefers orange.) “For lunch I would have a soda. And then dinner was really late, so I would go and get one before I left, and then I’d drink another one. And I was like, whoa, that’s a lot of sugar. So I stopped doing that.”

After beating France’s Mathilde Johansson 6-3, 6-2, Stephens is through to the fourth round of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time in her career. She’ll next face Samantha Stosur, last year’s U.S. Open champion and a finalist at the 2010 French Open.

Stephens, 19, has long been on the radar of those paying attention on her native side of the Atlantic. Here’s what stands out the most: She hits the ball with what seems like no effort at all. One wouldn’t call her swings graceful in the mold of Roger Federer, but they’re clean, efficient and seemingly the same every time. She’s not terribly big (5-foot-7, 135 pounds) but Stephens has uncommon power. She makes hitting a tennis ball look easy, like she could do it for hours without sweating a drop.

“She can hit winners on any type of ball,” Johansson said. “She’s very powerful, and she’s a physical player.”

Stephens’s mother, Sybil Smith, was an All-America swimmer at Boston University. Her father, John Stephens, was a running back for the New England Patriots and other teams; he died in a car crash in 2009. Sloane Stephens didn’t know him as a child (her parents were divorced) and she had only been in touch with him for a few years before his death. Sheldon Smith, her stepfather, died of cancer in 2007.

Stephens is a thinker, a talker and an obsessive tweeter. She may be low in the rankings (No. 70) but as personalities go in tennis, she’s already close to the top. A sample from her press conference Friday:

• On her victory: “I’m excited, because now I’m going to have more Twitter followers.”

• On her return home from Paris: “Definitely going home first class. Definitely.”

• What about her family? “I don’t know what they’re going to be doing, but I know where I’m going to be.”

• On why she didn’t get a car after the U.S. Open: “If you see gas prices, they’re ridiculous.”

As the Journal’s Tennis Tracker shows, her output in Paris has been solid, though not quite the stratospheric display being put on by Maria Sharapova and other contenders. Still, Stephens has a good game and good footwork for clay. She has been in Europe all spring, training at Barcelona Total Tennis. She said she didn’t get off to a good start mentally: “I was being 19, and I think now I am being 29.”

So she did what she always does in emergencies: She called her family. Her aunt, Kalen Wright, flew to Barcelona to help, and her mother followed. Both of them are here in Paris.

Stephens revealed one more secret beyond her soda ban: a necklace from her grandparents.

“It says, ‘In calmness and confidence,’” she said. “Every time I’m getting really tight or I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing?’ I’m just like, okay, relax, you can do that.” So far, it has worked beautifully.

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